The Western group of poems includes all those that are not Scandinavian; there is only one among them which is not English, the poem of _Hildebrand_. They do not afford any very copious material for inferences as to the whole course and progress of poetry in the regions to which they belong. A comparison of the fragmentary _Hildebrand_ with the fragments of _Waldere_ shows a remarkable difference in compass and fulness; but, at the same time, the vocabulary and phrases of _Hildebrand_ declare that poem unmistakably to belong to the same family as the more elaborate _Waldere_. _Finnesburh_, the fragmentary poem of the lost Lambeth MS., seems almost as far removed as _Hildebrand_ from the more expansive and leisurely method of _Waldere_; while _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, and the poem of _Maldon_ resemble one another in their greater ease and fluency, as compared with the brevity and abruptness of _Hildebrand_ or _Finnesburh_. The documents, as far as they go, bear out the view that in the Western German tongues, or at any rate in England, there was a development of heroic poetry tending to a greater amplitude of narration. This progress falls a long way short of the fulness of Homer, not to speak of the extreme diffuseness of some of the French _Chansons de Geste_. It is such, however, as to distinguish the English poems, _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, and _Byrhtnoth_, very obviously from the poem of _Hildebrand_. While, at the same time, the brevity of _Hildebrand_ is not like the brevity of the Northern poems. _Hildebrand_ is a poem capable of expansion. It is easy enough to see in what manner its outlines might be filled up and brought into the proportions of _Waldere_ or _Beowulf_. In the Northern poems, on the other hand, there is a lyrical conciseness, and a broken emphatic manner of exposition, which from first to last prevented any such increase of volume as seems to have taken place in the old English poetry; though there are some poems, the _Atlamál_ particularly, which indicate that some of the Northern poets wished to go to work on a larger scale than was generally allowed them by their traditions. In the Northern group there is a great variety in respect of the amount of incident that goes to a single poem; some poems deal with a single adventure, while others give an abstract of a whole heroic history. In the Western poems this variety is not to be found. There is a difference in this respect between _Hildebrand_ and _Waldere_, and still more, at least on the surface, between _Hildebrand_ and _Beowulf_; but nothing like the difference between the _Lay of the Hammer_ (Þrymskviða), which is an episode of Thor, and the _Lay of Weland_ or the _Lay of Brynhild_, which give in a summary way a whole history from beginning to end. _Hildebrand_ tells of the encounter of father and son, Hildebrand and Hadubrand, with a few references to the past of Hildebrand and his relations to Odoacer and Theodoric. It is one adventure, a tragedy in one scene.